Oh, that civility!
Apparently it ends when talking about the Tea Partiers.
Joe Nocera of the NY Times writes:
You know what they say: Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.
Can’t really disagree with that. Except the next sentence is this:
These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.
It goes on in that vein. And on and on—extending the metaphor and ending with this:
For now, the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests. But rest assured: They’ll have them on again soon enough. After all, they’ve gotten so much encouragement.
Ah, it’s just words, right?
[ADDENDUM: It seems to be the meme du jour, although Joe Biden denies ever saying it.
See also this. And Jonah Goldberg observes:
Tom Friedman ”” who knows a bit about Hezbollah ”” calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. ]
The shocking and hate-fulled nastiness is all over the Dem statements! I am filled with an overwhelming urge to post about it on Facebook, but prefer to keep my ideological political statements to myself. I do tend to post things right of center, but try not to say anything far right OR point out the hypocrisy of the left.
It makes me sick, but it’s not worth getting into any nasty back-and-forths with dems on my friends list.
I’ll just be content to let the foam recede back into my mouth.
Salon has a piece by Michael Lind referring to the Tea Party as White Southern Extemism. I posted a comment there, for the benefit of the Salon devotees:
Notice: Change in Terminology
“White Southern Extremism” is the currently approved replacement for “Racist/Sexist/Homophobe”, since that expression has lost its power through over use. When “White Southern Extremism” loses its power you will be informed about its replacement. (EOM)
“”These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.””
Ummm…Didn’t the American people just vote them in?
SteveH: ah, but don’t you know that the Tea Party is not part of the American people.
Wait a second, we’re terrorists? Like Jihadists? Then the left should love us!
The surest proof that we are not is that the left hates us.
Case. Closed.
That column is appalling. Nocera is a hop, skip and jump from calling for Obama to declare martial law.
Notice that all the progressives are using the same terrorist meme? They have poll tested this as being an effective appeal to people’s feelings. Once they begin, they keep repeating it until it becomes………….fact. The big lie technique. Yet hardly anyone calls them on it.
Extremists. Racists. Terroists. All terms of endearment.
When they finally call me a cannibalistic baby eater, I’ll be confident they’ve lost the debate.
When Tea Partiers were merely holding meetings and affecting a few elections, they were racists and crazies. Now that they’re affecting important legislation they’re terrorists and jihadists.
I’m with Scott. It seems we’re making progress.
How would hate-filled lefties describe me? I am a female Hispanic lesbian from So Cal who supports much of what the Tea Party stands for. I don’t exactly fit their silly narrative. I especially enjoy the look on people’s faces when I tell them I’m a Conservative. Oh the horrors….
And since when is calling for fiscal discipline in our government something so horrific? These Dem politicians and MSM nitwits pushing this meme disgust me. I am a non-violent person, but sometimes I fantasize bitch-slapping the lot of them. That’s pretty bad, I realize, but I just wish I could knock some sense into them.
Like JuliB I refrain from posting anything overtly political on FB. However, I refuse to let my sister, a full-on Moonbat, whom I love dearly, get away with posting outrageous things about Conservatives. I just won’t stand for that any longer.
Neo, I do so enjoy reading your blog and your posters.
I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.
John Mellencamp
Damn Dubya
“”And since when is calling for fiscal discipline in our government something so horrific?
Linda
Since democrats became addicted to big nanny government. Denying them an increasing dosage means you’re just a hate filled meannie and obviously a sellout to hispanic lesbians the world over.
“Salon has a piece by Michael Lind referring to the Tea Party as White Southern Extemism.”
All those Tea Party folks in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas must wonder when the hell somebody moved the Mason Dixon line.
I want to add something a bit more serious than my previous piece of sarcasm. Particularly, I think this should be of interest to JuliB and Linda, whose posts got me a-thinkin’.
While I share JuliB’s and Linda’s piping fury at this deluge of insane hyperbole, perhaps we can try and gain from it some useful insight into the yawning cavern that is the mind of the modern leftist, and then take some comfort in a re-confirmation of the conviction that whatever bad we might say about the right, it is immeasurably preferable to be there, warts and all, than on the left. Linda’s post helped me recall that no matter where I fell on the identity-politics grid, and even if I did disagreed with the right on certain issues, being on the left for me would not be an option. Guys like Nocera crystallize why that should be.
So lets stop briefly and ask two poignant questions:
1) How many leftists would ever refer to CAIR, ISNA, the Muslim Brotherhood, or someone like Sami al-Arian, as “terrorists” or “terrorist supporters”?
2) How many leftists in their heart-of-hearts actually believe that the GOP is a deeply evil, somehow terroristic enterprise?
Few and many, respectively, are the correct answers.
And that is all a sane person needs to know in order to be certain that the left is no place for sane people. (By “sane” I simply mean an average person with ordinary moral principles.)
As I repeat a lot in my comments here, even if I could not, for whatever reasons, call myself a conservative – and there was a time when I couldn’t – never, even in my darkest periods of political ignorance, could I call myself a man of the left. The left’s moral compass is so far beyond broken that it beggars belief to merely hear the assertion that they have one. Their moral code boils down to “My heart is in the right place,” with “the right place” being defined as “Wherever my heart is.” More on that anon.
At the same time, we shouldn’t attribute more intelligence to the left than is warranted by the evidence. For my part, I see this kind of paranoid rhetoric as emerging from the confluence of three related phenomena:
First, the left is not guided by any moral code, but by emotions which counsel certain allegiances (with “the poor,” “the oppressed,” and so forth).
Second, lacking principles, their emotions lead them to feel that the enemy of all the people they sympathize with are to the right (this is “the enemy is always to the right” axiom). The right is evil because they are felt by the left to be essentially “Those whose hearts are in the wrong place.”
Third, since the left’s emotions are those they presume are felt by saints, heroes, and messiahs, they believe they are superior in every way to their enemies to the right – hence, they believe that they are entitled to use malicious hyperbole because the left, being smarter and intrinsically saintly, “understands” that it’s “just rhetoric.”
In sum: Childish sentimentalism, exclusive hatred of the right, and malignant narcissism. All in all, a pathetic little pool of cess.
Whatever one might say about the wisdom of the right’s policy prescriptions, they do not spring from the hearts and minds of people who are animated purely by sentimentality, hatred, and narcissism. A leftist might beg to differ, but I in turn point him back to the sundry remarks neo and others have pointed to and ask him to explain.
The explanation, disturbingly, tends to confirm rather than disprove our analysis here: “But the right is acting terroristically!” “They want the country to burn for their corporate cronies!” “They want to endanger life as we know it!” “We, the left, only use such rhetoric when it’s justified, and unlike the right, we understand the difference between rhetoric and literal equivalences, for we are the nuanced ones!” etc., etc…
It all comes back to what we outlined above.
The leftist begins with the dead certainty that morality = heart-being-in-the-right-place = wherever the leftist heart is. They then negate this and get the equation for the right. This is what I’ve called before (pilfering from Eric Voegelin) their political Gnosticism. Because the left subsumes life under politics, and thus expresses morality at its highest in terms of politics, all of humanity tends to split between the allies of the Force of Light (the left) and the allies of the Force of Darkness (the right). Hence “political” Gnosticism.
From there, hatred sprouts its rotten shoots, and the fruit cannot but be revealed in the way the leftist speaks. By the same token, when we pay attention as the leftist “explains” himself or his fellows, we catch glimpses of the flip-side of his hatred, a quality entailed by the formulae of political Gnosticism: “We are the allies of Light,” i.e., malignant narcissism.
To paraphrase Churchill, let them do their worst. We shall do our best.
Nocera is putting out the theme of why Obama needs to get elected:
“Cutting spending spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression, where it stayed until the arrival of the stimulus package known as World War II. That’s the path we’re now on. Our enemies could not have designed a better plan to weaken the American economy than this debt-ceiling deal.”
There it is folks. WWII was a stimulus package. Over 400,000 troops lost their lives and many many more suffered injuries. All that production and it was used to destroy life and property. And that’s a stimulus. Wow. The ugliness of such a view is indescribable.
And the reason for compromise: The idea that if we didn’t the spin would devastate election chances. So we compromised and the media will describe it as a tea party victory, a victory for which the tea party will be blamed as a victory which “spiraled the country right back into the Great Depression.”
We are in bizzaro world, deconstructionist world, when we deal with Democrats. It doesn’t matter what we do or say because the Democrats have a philosophy so “situational” and dishonest that it can be twisted to prove any point.
But the political war is not lost. Not by a long shot. In fact, the rhetoric does indeed show desperation and is turning off many people.
It’s just jawdropping, the venom towards the Tea Party – I was halfway accustomed to it, when it was just lefty-prog-lib randing on comment threads on Open Salon. Even old hoof-in-mouth Joe Biden you kind of halfway expect to be so clumsily partisan and insulting, but to see commentators like Ben Stein, and RINO politicians like John McCain cut lose with both barrels … that is disheartening. I can only think of it as the last outraged squealing of the entrenched political/elite/media class, as they face a fiscally responsible and determined ‘country class’, to use Angelo Codevilla’s expression. November 2012 is coming, and they know in their hearts that they will lose… for some of them, it may be their first political defeat in years. Can’t come soon enough for me.
Okay, riddle me this:
Suppose tomorrow, a desperate person of conservative bent awoke, got out of bed, got dressed, visited the office of his friendly neighborhood Democrat congresscritter, and riddled it with bullets, all the while screaming “You call me a terrorist?? I’LL show you a f***ing terrorist!!”
Please assume that no one gets hurt in the process… but that a lot of computers die violent deaths.
Would our liberal intelligentsia, from the Vice President on down, take even a moment to think that perhaps their rhetoric led to this event?
(Of course not. Why should they think themselves the cause of the gunman’s actions, just because he says they were? They would take it, instead, as proof of how violent conservatives are… meaning that their own violent rhetoric was not incendiary, but merely descriptive.)
And that, perhaps, is part of the problem. The Left can call us anything they like… because they pay no price for doing so, the media gives them a free pass on it, and because they know we won’t live up to their name-calling.
It’s the same principle whereby liberals deride dangerous gun-toting single-digit-IQ rednecks, but don’t seem afraid that these guns will ever be aimed at them for their harsh words.
They dare not offend the real terrorists, though… because real terrorists actually do kill people for their political beliefs, don’t they?
One other question:
Liberals in general tend to be believers in the Power of the Word. Our President is a classic example of this; he was elected in large part based on his supposed eloquence, and seemed actually to believe that there was no world problem he could not solve by speaking about it.
And yet, these same people, so confident in the power of words over actions, can nonetheless be very careless indeed with their words.
Why is that? Is it that they think stray words don’t matter, because a few more words will fix everything?
respectfully (but confusedly),
Daniel in Brookline
This is why, in my part of the USA, the Deep South, the dirtiest word folks I hang with can call someone is “Democrat”.
These “liberals” (i.e., State-humpers) are simply the New Tories. The old Tories probably considered the Sons of Liberty “terrorists.” The current “liberal” party-line on the Tea Party is just another way of saying, “These demmed peasants–why can’t they just shut up and pay their taxes and submit quietly to their betters?”
I want to get a bumper sticker and T-shirt that say TEAorrist.
“In order to oust the kulaks as a class, the resistance of this class must be smashed in open battle and it must be deprived of the productive sources of its existence and development (free use of land, instruments of production, land-renting, right to hire labour, etc.).”
J. Stalin
From:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1930/01/21.htm
Once the Democrats are able to get the MSM to make it acceptable, even fashionable, to slur the Tea Party and company as equivalent to Islamists, then the stage is set to expand police state powers against them (us). The Democrats have been hugely successful in using the political system and the constitutional/legislative/executive system to legally usurp and sabotage the nation economically by an obviously unsustainable deficit spending program, setting the stage for a major crisis far surpassing the 1930’s depression. Obama must be salivating at the prospect of finishing in a second term, what he started in the first.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/08/if-obama-administration-really-expects-to-create-jobs-why-is-labor-secretary-solis-speaking-at-anti-capitalist-rallies/
There’s a guy on a comment thread at PJ Media who is swearing that he will go go the next Tea Party rally in his neighborhood as a Hobbit Terrorist … bomb in turban, woolly feet and all. And a guy on another thread is asking for an artist to do a graphic for a tee-shirt with the motto
“Serfs Up!”
I am just livid about this latest round of slurs. A lot of the Tea Party activists I knew early on were military veterans. To get a ration of c**p like this from someone sitting in the administration’s VP slot is just infuriating. And I don’t care of Foot-in-mouth Joe Biden is walking back from what he said. Any media creatures, any politician, any news media commentator mouthing this slur is, from this moment on, someone whom I will boycott, vote against … whatever. They are nothing to me. Nothing. I don’t even want to go onto Open Salon and get into a discussion with other OSers holding that line. The line is crossed — no more nice Sgt. Mom.
NY Times aka Pravda aka Izvestia=Vast Piles of Poop.
All we can do is vote them out. We need to win more elections.
And then we’ll need to lock and load. I’m serious. They aren’t going to see things “our way” if you will. And i damned sure won’t see it their way.
As simple as it gets: you need a hundred bucks a month to pay your bills. you make 59 bucks, and borrow 41 – every month. That is what our government is doing. And it can NOT be sustained. Even if they take all of everyone’s money.
There is a regrettable assumption that the 2012 elections will be no more fraudulent than in the past, that we’ll just turn the bastards out. Given the likelihood of hyperenhanced fraud, and Leftist mediaspeak herding the sheeple, I am skeptical albeit hopeful. The bastards may indeed persist to 2016, and at that point the USA will be just another sack of crispy critters.
I agree with the lock and load theme. Best buy ammo now, before it gets regulated into unavailability.
“Oh, that civility”
heh. I started to post something (then changed my mind) about Nocera’s piece on my blog under the title “Civility rears its ugly head” Can these people not hear themselves?
Perfected Democrat:
See also this Belmont Club thread on this same topic, including my comment #63:
I erroneously stated earlier that no one calls the dems on their big lie propaganda technique. Well, good old Bill O’Reilly made it the top story on his program tonight. Good for him! The MSM, however, is part of the propaganda machine so the blogosphere and Fox are about the only places where they are called out.
My suspicion is that the talking points are dreamed up and tested at places like John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, which is funded mostly by Soros. The talking points are then put out to a select list of MSM outlets and all democrat pols. Podesta was part of Bill Clinton’s administration and lead the effort to mislead the public about la affair Lewinsky and the impeachment. They sold the meme that it was strictly a personal affair and all about sex. Nothing to see here folks – move along. And they managed to sell it. A lot of us were pretty sure it was about perjury. That idea is now lost in the dustbin of history. Their propaganda techniques continue, however, because they work. Take a poll of average citizens tonight and you will find an alarming number who have bought the idea that the TEA Partiers are a bunch of radicals who could be compared to terrorists.
This battle for the future of this country will, to a great extent, be won in the communications fielded by the opposing forces. Unfortunately, the progressives have a huge advantage.
J.J. formerly Jimmy J. Says:
“Notice that all the progressives are using the same terrorist meme?”
Yeah, it is sort of like all these talking heads are mouthing democrat talking points.
Sorta like journalists just did during the actual debt ceiling debate (we will default unless it is raised by aug 2.. stated as fact over and over).
Linda Says:
“I especially enjoy the look on people’s faces when I tell them I’m a Conservative. Oh the horrors….”
Awesome. 🙂
rickl Says:
“Given the left’s history of dehumanizing their opponents (and what happens after that)”
Ummm, outside of communists countries what usually happened is the left started the use of violence and then had their ass kicked. When Euro history books I’ve read talk about these times they routinely added adjectives in front of Marxist such as hapless and bumbling. The people doing the kicking were not necessarily nice middle class classical liberals… but still… when it comes down to it; if they started using routine violence it wouldn’t go well for them even in the here and now.
Two comments:
1. This terrorist nonsense comes right from the top. Larry Summers –who really ought to know better–has been talking about ‘terrorists’ and ‘hostage takers’ for a few weeks now. Obama could issue a statement and put a stop to it, if he really believes in civility. But he won’t–unless he decides that it would help his poll numbers with independent voters………..
2. Obama, the left and the Democratic party establishment have been amply rewarded in recent years by shocking, even scandalous, rhetoric. Remember how they demonized George Bush? Dick Cheney?
You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
Wait until we take over in 2012.
Then we’ll see just how nasty the left can really be. You want to see real domestic terrorism?
I predict civil disobedience and riots the likes of which haven’t been seen since 1969.
The Leftist mindset concerning the threat of terrorism:
Terror, terror everywhere,
except the Islamic link!
Linda,
Quite the visual (the look on people’s faces).
It’s about clarity, common sense and values.
It’s about understanding economics 101. Oh the horror. 🙂
The good news is anyone who thinks tea partiers are terrorist are so disengaged from the current political landscape that a cloudy day will keep them from the voting booth.
Kolnai,
Your post reminds me the phrase, “the ends justify the means”.
Good intentions are to common people not enough.
They are entirely the point to the left so much so that good people are harmed and misery is spread and the facts be damned.
“”I will say that George Bush has divided us; he has filled this country with hatred.
John Mellencamp””
It’s about time conservative journalist went after idiots like Mellencamp, Andy Griffith, Ron Howard, Tom Hanks and Jimmy Buffet. They need to be relentlessly dogged for their part in getting the bigotted manchild elected and the resulting human suffering.
I said yesterday:
“When they finally call me a cannibalistic baby eater, I’ll be confident they’ve lost the debate.”
It took exactly one day for MoDo to invoke the cannibal metaphor. When I made the commnent, I used cannibal because I couldn’t think of anything worse to call someone. What’s worse than cannibal? Necrophiliac?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opinion/washington-chain-saw-massacre.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Scott,
mmm.. there is worse…
Don’t drug addicts and alcoholics lash out with cruel insults when their family imposes an intervention on them? I’m jus sayin….
Baklava –
Precisely. And here’s a “hear hear” to our analysis from Charlie Cooke at NRO, analyzing the latest Maureen Dowd niaiserie:
“At the root of the attitude that has got us into this mess is a perverted conception of morality, in which spending without limit, advocating short-term gain at the expense of long-term solvency, and imposing mountainous debt on our children and grandchildren is Good, but living within our means and, you know, not precipitating the decline of civilization is Bad. It is a morality in which intentions are the only things that matter, and reality must bend to meet our indulgences. Never mind that we can’t afford it, do you WANT it? You don’t? You’re a monster.”
It is no accident that the Tea Party is being smeared with the terrorist meme.
MSNBC Host, Guest Consider Whether Tea Partiers Are Addicts, ‘Delusional’
source: Weekly Standard
Obama Administration Addresses Issue Of Home Grown Terrorism
source: nj101.5.com
What is it with you guys that a simple metaphor is beyond your understanding? The suggestion is not that y’all are literally gun-toting, bomb-throwing terrorists — although judging by the threats and rhetoric of some righties this cannot be ruled out — but that y’all are metaphoric terrorists in that you threatened to metaphorically blow up the world economy if your demands weren’t met.
That the Republicans’ position is analogous to that of the basic terrorist, threatening destruction in order to impose their political will, cannot really be denied, and so far no one here has; all they have done is whine about the harshness of the metaphor, not whether it is applicable.
Metaphor, allegory, analogy — all concepts that allow humankind to express themselves in an infinite amount to ways, but not to you lot — to you, we must be 100% literal. How dull.
And how repressive! For a crew that constantly pats itself on the head for its adherence to Liberty & Freedomâ„¢, you are hell bent on silencing any kind of criticism hurled your way, and not because of the content but merely the form. Is equating y’all with terrorists somehow un-PC? I thought y’all hated PC-ness! Oooh! Such delicate flowers you are!
So come on, someone, take the challenge and explain why this analogy is not perfectly apt — I’ll bring the popcorn.
Cheers
Elroy